Abstract

This paper documents an exercise to synthesize and assess the best available scientific knowledge on the effectiveness of different farm practices at enhancing natural pest regulation in agriculture. It demonstrates a novel combination of three approaches to evidence synthesis—systematic literature search, collated synopsis and evidence assessment using an expert panel. These approaches follow a logical sequence moving from a large volume of disparate evidence to a simple, easily understandable answer for use in policy or practice. The example of natural pest regulation in agriculture was selected as a case study within two independent science-policy interface projects, one European and one British. A third funder, a private business, supported the final stage to translate the synthesized findings into a useful, simplified output for agronomists. As a whole, the case study showcases how a network of scientific knowledge holders and knowledge users can work together to improve the use of science in policy and practice. The process identified five practices with good evidence of a benefit to natural pest regulation, with the most beneficial being ‘Combine trap and repellent crops in a push–pull system’. It highlights knowledge gaps, or potential research priorities, by showing practices considered important by stakeholders for which there is not enough evidence to make an assessment of effects on natural pest regulation, including ‘Alter the timing of pesticide application.’ Finally, the process identifies several important practices where the volume of evidence of effects on natural pest regulation was too large (>300 experimental studies) to be summarised with the resources available, and for which focused systematic reviews may be the best approach. These very well studied practices include ‘Reduce tillage’ and ‘Plant more than one crop per field’.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s10531-016-1133-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Highlights

  • This paper describes an exercise to synthesize and assess the best available scientific knowledge on the effectiveness of different farm practices at enhancing natural pest regulation in agriculture

  • Natural pest regulation was selected as a focus by two independent science-policy interfaces, linked together through the European network of knowledge holders established by the BiodiversityKnowledge project (Nesshover et al 2016; Livoreil et al 2016)

  • The systematic literature search returned 33,852 studies (14,249 from CAB Abstracts and 19,603 from Web of Science) once duplicates were removed. We estimated that these searches obtained approximately 56 % of the relevant literature, based on the percentage of references from the benchmark list that were returned by the searches

Read more

Summary

Introduction

This paper describes an exercise to synthesize and assess the best available scientific knowledge on the effectiveness of different farm practices at enhancing natural pest regulation in agriculture. It demonstrates a novel combination of three different approaches to evidence synthesis—systematic literature search (Collaboration for Environmental Evidence 2013), collated synopsis (e.g. Williams et al 2013) and evidence assessment by expert panel These approaches follow a logical sequence from a large volume of disparate evidence to a simple, understandable answer for use in policy or practice They fall within the existing framework of the ‘4S’ hierarchy for organising evidence described by Dicks et al (2014b). Stakeholders from across industry (including food retailers and farmers), Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs), policy and academia were involved in shaping the process at five specific interaction points from beginning to end (Fig. 1 and Methods)

Methods
Results
Conclusion

Talk to us

Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have

Schedule a call

Disclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.